A Firearm with No Equal: All Hail the Handheld Rocket Gun

War Is Boring

Security,

A little too much firepower?

In the 1960s an American engineer and his partner invented a gun that fired rocket-propelled ammunition.

Yes, rocket-propelled. Like a space launch, only much smaller and way deadlier.

The Gyrojet handheld rocket gun was a unique child of both the Cold War and the Space Race. Meant for combat in Vietnam, it enjoyed a brief cameo in a James Bond flick and was the object of some half-hearted espionage — but soon fizzled out.

The Gyrojet was the brainchild of Robert Mainhardt, an engineer who had worked at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and his business partner Arthur Biehl. Much larger rocket weapons such as the bazooka and the Soviet RPG-7, designed to destroy tanks, were already in widespread use. Mainhardt and Biehl wanted to scale down the concept for taking out individual human beings.

Tiny rocket launcher

It’s important to think of the Gyrojet not as a gun that shot rockets but rather a rocket launcher that looked like a gun. The weapon, which came in both pistol and rifle configurations, was basically a tube with pistol or rifle-like ergonomics and a simple firing mechanism. Like its larger cousin the RPG, it had few moving parts — certainly fewer than a conventional pistol or rifle.

A conventional gun fires a bullet pushed by a single explosion inside the weapon. As the bullet travels farther away from the gun, the speed of the projectile slows. The Gyrojet rocket, on the other hand, actually got faster the farther it flew from the gun.